Introducing the Beyond These Gates Poetic Inquiry Data Artists
Marissa Byers, Corey Ewing, Daniel Gray-Kontar
City Rising is excited to welcome Marissa Byers, Corey Ewing, and Daniel Gray-Kontar to the Beyond These Gates project team as Poetic Inquiry Data Artists. Through their residencies, Byers, Ewing, and Gray-Kontar will help shape the project’s exploration of the former Indiana Women’s Prison, using poetry as a form of inquiry to surface stories, generate connections, and deepen understanding of the women who called the prison home; the complicated relationship between the prison and Indianapolis’ Near Eastside; and the ways this site, its history, and the people connected to it might be remembered and reimagined.
As the former Indiana Women’s Prison site enters a redevelopment process, Beyond These Gates seeks to ensure that the women whose personal histories are entangled with this place are part of the conversations about its future. What should happen to a place that carries so many different histories and meanings? What should be remembered? Whose experiences should inform what comes next?
Poetic inquiry offers one way of exploring these questions. As an arts-based research methodology, poetic inquiry uses poetry as a way to analyze, interpret, represent, and share data and human experience. For Beyond These Gates, the Poetic Inquiry Data Artists will engage with interviews, historical documents, and other project materials to create original works that illuminate the experiences of women who lived at the Indiana Women’s Prison. One of the project goals is to include the women’s perspectives on what the former prison might become and how its history should be remembered.
The Poetic Inquiry Data Artists’ work will also explore the complicated and often contradictory history of the prison itself. For some, it was a place of terror, exploitation, and confinement. For others, it was also a place they called home, a source of safety, or an opportunity for a second or third chance. For the surrounding neighborhoods, it has been a looming landmark whose presence (and absence) continues to shape the Near Eastside. These meanings do not fit neatly together, and what the prison was depends, in part, on who is telling the story.
Through poetic inquiry, Beyond These Gates will create space for these histories and perspectives to encounter one another. Not necessarily to resolve their contradictions, but to help us see, hear, and understand the former prison, and imagine its future, differently.
Meet the Poetic Inquiry Data Artists
Marissa Byers
Marissa Byers lives and writes in Indianapolis, creating invitations to feel deeply into our landscapes. Her background in environmental studies and community engagement shapes her perspective on themes like home, relationship, and what it means to be a part of nature. Her poems and essays can be found in Heartland Society for Women Writers anthologies, Dogwood Alchemy, and Indy Untitled. She has work featured in Spirit Dirt: Poison Ivy, the Center for Humans & Nature, and choreographed as a dance in Words in Motion. She also explores themes of connection as the co-organizer for People We Meet on the Bus, a collaborative storytelling project that gathers experiences from people who walk, bike, and take the bus within their communities in Indiana, and advocates for more accessible and dignifying public transit.
Corey Ewing
Corey Ewing is a native of Indianapolis, IN that pursued a love of poetry across the country on a whim. He would return home to support various poetic projects, including Word As Bond, Fighting Words Poetry, Cafe Creative and currently curates VOCAB. His poetry and photography have led him to work with National Geographic Society, BUTTER Art Fair, Indy Arts Council, and the Herbert Simon Family Foundation. He is a former Artist At Work with Kheprw Institute and continues to teach, coach, and create as a multi-disciplinary artist.
Daniel Gray-Kontar
Daniel Gray-Kontar, also known as Replife, is a poet, community development theorist, and civic architect. A National Poetry Slam champion, he founded Twelve Literary Arts in 2016 and led the organization for nearly a decade, while also chairing the Creative Writing Department at the Cleveland School of the Arts. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at MOCA Cleveland and completed a residency with the Cleveland Foundation's Creative Fusion program. He developed the Black Homespace framework and its companion practice, Homespacing, during academic appointments at Stanford and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Together, they reimagine home not as a fixed location but as a portable, spiritual technology for interior worldmaking. He is Principal of The Naming Studio, and his poetry has been shaped by oral history, migration, and memory, drawing on decades of practice in literary arts, youth development, and civic life.